$2 Million Grant Goes to Cochlear Implant Research

A National Institutes of Health grant of $2 million will be used by a researcher at USC toward a "project aimed at helping the formerly deaf with cochlear implants regain their appreciation for music." Ray Goldsworthy (who uses a CI himself) will study:

The role pitch perception plays in music comprehension. The ability to determine pitch — to distinguish if one sound is higher or lower than the other — is severely limited in once-deaf people with cochlear implants and a big reason that music is hard for them to hear. Goldsworthy plans to help subjects regain this ability through training software he has developed. He will also investigate new ways of encoding improved pitch into the electrical stimulation patterns of the cochlear implant — this stimulation is how sound is recognized — and use brain imaging to understand the changes in the brain that occur with pitch training.

Read more from USC here.